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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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The title of Roger Lundin’s book Believing
Again comes from the eighteenth-century German aphorist G. C.
Lichtenburg, who said “There is
a great difference between believing still and believing again.” Lundin picked
up the aphorism from the poet W. H. Auden, who used it on several occasions in
his Forewords and Afterwords to indicate the difference between a naïve
and tested belief (55, 87, 518). Those who believe still what the church has
always believed, what their parents believed, what they themselves believed as
children, says Lundin following Auden, do not believe like those who struggle
to come to terms with unbelief and find themselves believing again.

The
essays that comprise Lundin’s book are simply titled and arranged into three
sections. The first section includes two essays (“History” and “Science”),
which show the contours of the nineteenth-century’s crisis of faith. The second
section of essays (“Belief,” “Interpretation,” and “Reading”) examine different
facets of that crisis. The essays in the third section (“Story” and “Beauty”)
describe two creative responses to that crisis. In a final chapter called
“Memory,” Lundin tries to articulate an approach to the past that is Christian
rather than nostalgic. He quotes extensively throughout his essays from Emily
Dickinson, Herman Melville, W. H. Auden, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Czeslaw Milosz,
exemplars of the “nimble believing” (a phrase from one of Dickinson’s letters)
that Lundin considers a crucial stage in the journey to believing again. To be
clear, Lundin is not primarily interested in unbelief, not in refuting it or
fixing it. What Lundin hammers against in his essays are forms of believing
still, that is, forms of Christian belief too nostalgically attached to certain
moments in the past, to the supposedly unified Christian culture of the Middle
Ages, for example, or to the exalted view of the individual inspired by the
romantic period.

It is
easier to say what Lundin is against in these essays than what he is for, what
he means exactly by believing again, because he nowhere risks a clear,
overarching thesis, not for the collection as a whole, not in the individual
essays. The essay titles might have offered some guidance, if Lundin had said
that each one names a different obstacle or barrier to belief. For example, in
the third section, what preoccupies Lundin is not “Story” per se but stories
that have made the Christian story more difficult to believe. Similarly, in the
next essay, he is less interested in beauty than in concepts of beauty that
make it more difficult to appreciate the “beauty of belief” or “beauty as
belief” (212). Each chapter, then, names one tall hedge, one wall of the maze
depicted on the front cover of the book. Altogether, Lundin’s essays are
intended to be the ladder that readers can climb to help see the way out, to
see again the expansive field on the horizon, the great cash crop of
Evangelicalism—vigorous, green individual belief.

Yet to
judge this book by more than its cover, here are a few points of criticism
about the role of the literary arts in Lundin’s essays and about his depiction
of what constitutes believing still.

The
internal sequence of Lundin’s essays discloses some of his assumptions about
the role of literature. Take chapter two, “Science,” where Lundin uses
Dickinson, Auden, and Milosz to describe the growing conflict between science
and imaginative literature that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Each
poet depicts a suffering humanity living in the flinty, indifferent world given
to them by nineteenth-century science, and each poet turns, Lundin shows
convincingly, to images of a “suffering Christ” for consolation, as the old
arguments for design in creation break down. While Lundin clearly admires the
way these poets invoke the suffering Christ, he criticizes them, along with
much of twentieth-century theology, for not believing more, that is, for not
affirming the resurrected Jesus. Whereas the poets are reticent to speak of the
resurrection, “the New Testament asserts that we are able to know everything we
need to know” about the identity of Jesus (98). For Lundin, the poets
articulate the problem that the New Testament answers.

By
chapter seven, a pattern has emerged: the intellectual problem named by the
essay title is discussed at the beginning. Then the poets and novelists are
brought in to show the subtlety of the problem and struggle with it bravely.
Finally, the New Testament or the theologians (usually Karl Barth or Hans Urs
von Balthasar) arrive to solve the problem. For Lundin, artists like Melville
and Dickinson deserve praise because they don’t settle for unbelief, that is,
they keep struggling to believe, hinting at the supernatural. Yet, for “a
robust understanding” of what such hints point to, “the Christian student of
nature and culture” must turn to scripture and to the theologians (133). Even
where Lundin tries to qualify his usual submission of literature to theology,
he still keeps the arts not yet believing, just outside the borders of belief.
The poets “may not proclaim Christian truth as vigorously as the theologians,”
Lundin acknowledges, but that “should not obscure... the importance of their
restless, ceaseless, and nimble efforts to “believe again” (134). The word
“efforts” is crucial here. Try as they might, the poets cannot quite believe.

For
Lundin, good poetry seems to teach a kind of condescension toward unbelief: if
great artists like these refused to settle for unbelief, who are we to do
otherwise? Some Christian scholars may appreciate this approach to literature,
its careful preserving of the Bible as the last word or the theologians as the
final authority, but other scholars may feel more heavily the weight of
condescension, that something has been lost in using literature this way, as
round artistic holes for square theological pegs.

Another
problem is Lundin’s depiction of what constitutes believing still. For
example, he is right to try to historicize romanticism, as he does in chapter
one, to loosen the “ties between Protestant spirituality and romantic
aesthetics” (37), but he relies too heavily on old ideas about the period. He
would have a harder time criticizing the romantics if he had supplemented what
he learned from M. H. Abrams with more recent accounts of the period, such as
Lori Branch’s chapter on Wordsworth in her recent book Rituals of
Spontaneity (Baylor 2006).

Furthermore,
he rides out a number of times in his essays against what he calls “spatial
models” of truth, that is, notions of ourselves or of God that rely too much on
the language of up and down, inside and outside. Lundin recommends that we
abandon spatial metaphors and adopt “narrative” models of understanding
instead. Elsewhere, he tilts against what he calls the “occularcentric”
understanding of the self (193), a way of thinking dominated by visual
metaphors that Lundin says rose to power on practices of silent reading (186).
With his usual flair for generalization, he says that “the invention of the
printing press silenced the cosmos and paved the way for the rule of sight”
(201). It is difficult to imagine how we as human beings could escape this rule
of sight altogether, since we have eyes. And why should concepts of “narrative”
or “orality” give us access to the truth less prone to error or misuse than
concepts of “space” and “vision”? Yet, Lundin’s idea seems to be that if we
could change our spatial models of truth for narrative ones, trade our visual
metaphors of understanding for aural ones, then we would more closely
approximate “the priorities of the biblical writers” (198), and so find
ourselves believing again, more robustly, more resiliently.

Like
most intellectual hobbyhorses, these two are generally harmless, but there is
one moment in the essay where they pull Lundin into terrible understatement,
when he tries to recruit Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his attack against believing
still. Lundin says, “Bonhoeffer’s reflections on religionless Christianity and
the suffering of God were efforts to meet the challenges posed by spatial
models of the cosmos and visual conceptions of knowledge” (204). So what makes
it difficult to believe in a loving God who is at work in the world today?
Apparently, it is not the atrocities of war, the pervasiveness of human
suffering, or the worldliness of the church, not the rise of historical
criticism or evolutionary science, not these so much as quarrels over interpretation
and practices of silent reading.

Yet,
Bonhoeffer’s reflections on religionless Christianity, in his Letters and
Papers from Prison, are about much more, if one goes back to look. Whereas
Lundin wants to hold on to the possibility of believing again by reviving a
more humble author, a more moderated view of language, a shift to aural
metaphors of understanding, Bonhoeffer seems to be trying to find a way beyond
the struggle between belief and unbelief altogether, that is, a way for
Christians to stop putting all their efforts into maintaining their own belief,
in however subtle a form, and, more importantly, to stop clinging to a God of
the humanistic gaps, a God who only appears, Bonhoeffer says, “for the apparent
solution of insoluble problems, or as strength in human failure—always, that is
to say, exploiting human weakness or human boundaries” (154). This is the
passage from Bonhoeffer that one wishes Lundin had spent more time with than he
does (206–207), especially toward the end of his book.

In the
last essay, “Memory,” Lundin discloses what he considers to be the crucial
legacy of the nineteenth century, not its skeptical historicism or proud
science but its preoccupation with orphans, which illustrates to Lundin that
the era’s “delight in having been liberated was slowly changing into the fear
of being abandoned” (274). Lundin is there to speak tenderly to that fear, of
course, to hint that Christians need not be so afraid, if they believe in God.
What then moves us to believe again? Refusing nostalgia, Lundin settles for a
kind of pathology of the Victorian period that he calls his intellectual home
(3). Thus, despite his admirable taste in authors, his well selected
quotations, his ability to lean on the work of other scholars, his forthrightness
in speaking of his own faith, and his candid reliance on theologians and the
New Testament, Believing Again too often keeps God at the limits of
human ability, not transcendent so much as tethered to our weaknesses, to what
literature cannot quite achieve, and, ultimately, for Lundin, to the fear that
our secular age has been abandoned by God.

Kevin
Seidel is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Mennonite University.